You'll get many retro points for using either of those! (Although, to be honest, a modern system like the ones you mention will probably be easier to use. Depends on how patient you and/or your daughter are!)

ALPS I've never seen. It seems to be RARE and missing in action... but watch this space..!

lurkio wrote:
ALPS I've never seen. It seems to be RARE and missing in action... but watch this space..!

I spent a LOT of time on ALPS when I was a teenager. I suspect it contributed to my love of writing. Sadly, I sold the software years ago.

If you want to write adventures that could be played on quite a range of platforms, you could give Inform a look. That's a language that compiles into Z-code, for which there's interpreters on many modern operating systems.

It is PAWS they are just being lazy (I think, my memory a bit hazy now) and dropping the 'S'.

On that page it does say

The best. The beautiful. The one and only Professional Adventure Writing System by Gilsoft.

Edit: Sometime they say PAW and sometimes PAWS. Not sure if they are using them in the same context or different context. Slightly confusing. But yes it is the same thing. But as I only have Acorns these days I need someone to write the BBC version.

In his relentless quest to track down every Beeb game ever for bbcmicro.co.uk, Lee turned up the text adventure game Plane Crash by Michael Cowgill of Labyrinth Software in the StairwayToHell tape archive. It was originally written in GAC's little brother, Adventure Creator (AC), which can do multi-part games but only on cassette tape.*

I thought it would be interesting to see if the three-part tape game Plane Crash could be ported to the disc version of GAC for the Model B, and thus explode the myth that GAC can't do multi-part games -- which isn't really a myth at all but is in fact what the official documentation says, i.e. that only AC can do multi-part games (using the CHN command in the AC text adventure programming language), and GAC can't.

It turns out that you can take the three original data files for Plane Crash (created in AC), load them into the GAC game editor, tweak them slightly,** and then generate three separate self-contained games on disc. But then how can players carry their objects and score from Part 1 to Part 2 to Part 3 (I hear you cry)? Well, they can simply save their game after successfully completing one part and then reboot and load the savegame in the next part!

So it seems that with a little extra work, GAC could have natively supported multi-part disc games out of the box, with no need for inelegant workarounds like this. So why didn't it? No idea! It's baffling.

Here's the game, Plane Crash, converted with GAC to run on disc in a Model B:

* There is actually a disc version of Plane Crash on STH, but it's essentially just a straight tape-to-disc file-copy and only runs on an &E00 DFS, like the one for the Electron (or the ElectrEm emulator), or the one for the Master 128 (or BeebEm in M128 mode).